[1] Imagine a Roman or English judge being addressed as Demosthenes, in his speech against Pantaenetus, addressed (in his client’s name) the Athenian jury: “I know I have a hurried gait and a loud voice, and it annoys people; but I am as I was made, and I have a right to justice all the same.” It sounds like a speech to a jury of schoolboys.
[2] P. 300 above.
5. “Class” is in democratic countries no longer a political institution. A man’s vote is secured to him on a minimum qualification, and his practical influence and acceptance depend neither on {311} birth nor on occupation, but on the power which he can exercise by his qualities or his possessions. This is a consequence of the recognition of humanity as such, and has its bad side and its good side according to the baseness and nobility of the influences which tell de facto upon human nature. It is horrible, we may say, that influence should belong to wealth without any security whatever for a discharge of social function. But this, given human nature as it is to-day, is a result of the same causes which enable us to boast, with some truth, that a man ranks in the general world by his powers, character, and behaviour, and that we do not know or care whether his livelihood comes to him as a miner or as a duke. Wealth has weight because people give it weight; but no one need give weight to wealth in politics or social intercourse unless he likes. It is a consequence, then, of the recognition of free humanity that “class” no longer is an institution in political right as such, while in social intercourse, though it practically exists as an institution, it claims to be an expression of what people are in character and behaviour, and its differences are not annexed by any iron bond to differences of occupation. [1]
[1] It may be taken as proved that a “gentleman” can make his living as a labourer or mechanic—at least in the U.S.A., where irrational tradition is weaker than in England—and remain a gentleman in the drawing-room sense of the term as well as in essentials. This being so, there can be no inherent impossibility in men born and bred as labourers or mechanics realising the same qualities. It would be cant, I think, to say that full equality of social class, full pleasantness and freedom of intercourse, could be attained without those qualities.
But though occupation no longer determines either social or political class, in the sense of {312} gradation by any formal bond, yet it remains and must always remain a determinant of class in a narrower sense, and one of the main ideas which constitute the ethical structure of the mind.
The necessities which we compared roughly to time and space—the proximate permanent group and the adjacent locality—give a value to man’s animal routine, and a significance to the area of his every-day perceptions. It is when the division of labour, the requital of one service by a different one, becomes prominent in a community, that a further grasp is laid upon the distinctive capacities of the individual consciousness, in which must be reckoned the surroundings which constitute its horizon of possibilities. We still answer the general question, “What is he?” by naming a man’s industry or profession. The family and the neighbourhood sustain and colour the individual life, but the vocation stamps and moulds it. The more definite and articulate summons of the organising world—in which of course intelligence is active, ever discerning new purposes in old routine—elicits a deeper response from, or takes a more concrete shape in, the particular centre of consciousness. The individual has his own nature communicated to him as he is summoned to fit himself for rendering a distinctive service to the common good. He becomes “something”; an incarnation of a factor in the social idea.
The Roman word “class,” which the English language has adopted, not for every separate employment, but for the character and position roughly connected with a whole group of employments, has an origin worth recalling. Plato’s classes {313} were “genera” = clans, extended families. The German classes were “Stände” = statuses, positions, estates (compare the French “état,” which practically = trade). But the Roman “classis” was “a summoning” to public service; the first and second classes were the first and second summonings; [1] then indeed to military service in an order based on wealth. But the idea may survive. Our “class” may be thought of as the group or body in which we are called out for distinctive service.
[1] Mommsen Rom. Hist., i. 101, E. tr. The “classicus” was the trumpet.
One’s class, then, in the sense in which it indicates the type of position and service involved in one’s occupation, approaches very near the centre of one’s individuality. In principle, as an ethical idea, it takes the man or woman beyond the family and the neighbourhood; and for the same reason takes him deeper into himself. He acquires in it a complex of qualities and capacities which put a special point upon the general need of making a livelihood for the support of his household. In principle, his individual service is the social mind, as it takes, in his consciousness, the shape demanded by the logic of the social whole. He is “a public worker” [1] by doing the service which society demands of him. And just because the service is in principle something particular, unique, and distinctive, he feels himself in it to be a member of a unity held together by differences. And in this sense the bond of social union is not in similarity, but in the highest degree of individuality or specialisation, the ultimate point of which would be to feel that I am rendering {314} to society a service which is necessary, and which no one but me can render—the closest conceivable tie, and yet one, which in a sense, really exists in every case. Your special powers and functions supply my need, and my special powers and functions supply your need, and each of us recognises this and rejoices in it. This ethical idea of unique service, or the service of a unique class, involves of course a more or less conscious identity in difference. That is to say, the individual’s mind is not reduced to his special service, or he would be a machine. Rather, the whole social consciousness is present in him, but present in a modified form, according to the point of view from which it is looking. The problem is simply put by Plato’s diagrammatic scheme of classes. The statesman’s function is to be wise for the community; the carpenter’s to carpenter for the community. But plainly the community for which the statesman knows that he has to be wise, must include the carpenter’s life and the conditions of his work, and the community for which the carpenter knows that he has to work must include some of the order and organisation which belong to it in the statesman’s vision. The individual, in short, is unique, or belongs to a unique class, not as an atom, but as a case of a law, or term of a connection. This is what is meant by individuality in the true sense; the character of a unit which has a great deal that, being his very self, cannot be divided from him; not one which has so little that there is nothing by subtraction of which he can be imagined less. Such individuality is in a sense the whole ethical idea, but more particularly is embodied in {315} the idea of a vocation. Our vocation, like our neighbourhood, and usually of course in connection with it, stamps both mind and body; and what we consider most intimately ourself is really the structure of ethical ideas which we are describing, with the feelings and habits in which they are rooted, but none of which are unmodified by them.
[1] Greek δημιοῦργος [demiourgos], “artisan.” Homer speaks of “those who are public workers—the soothsayer, the doctor, and the carpenter.”